Russia was a strange place at the time. As a kid, the thing that I was totally horrified by, and still haunts me today, was the large number of maimed ex- servicemen. The parks and some of the streets were littered with these drunken “Heroes of the Soviet Union”. They had arms, and legs missing and some with horrific facial injuries. This was fifteen years after the war; a lot of drunks freeze to death every winter. There was an absolute army of them dotted all over the city. A drunk laying or sitting on the ground is kid height.
When I derided the Standard Issue Soviet Servant (SISS) about drunken Russians, she told me about the tremendous suffering that the people had gone through in the war and the huge loss of life. Not a Communist propaganda account of history, just matter of fact in a voice of sorrow. (Some sources now quote twenty seven million dead)
As westerners in Moscow we were not as isolated as most, my mother had been sent to Bulgaria I think it was, just after the war, and had to learn Bulgarian. In Russia she spoke Russian with a Bulgarian accent, it must have been very passable, as she chatted to people on the busses and trams engaged in the banter in the local markets. It was just like being in the UK, as there was not a language barrier. As was usual at the time, there were shortages, if you had full shopping bags, strangers would stop you in the street and ask what shops had the supplies that day. Sometimes at the market after a purchase had been made and we were about to leave, the stallholder would give my mother a few more vegetables, saying in Russian “for the child”.
At the start of winter quite a few people stopped us in the street and told my mother off for not getting me a hat. As a lot of the body heat is lost through the top of the head it is essential to wear suitable head covering in a Russian winter, the cold creeps up on you slowly, and then you are dead. I do not know what she said in return, but whatever it was, a red snow suit arrived from Helsinki. The Russians at the time, wore rags wrapped round their shoes, old sacks to give extra layers of clothing, everyone was rather Dickensian. Wearing that red snow suit I stood out in Moscow like a sore thumb. People were now stopping us in the street and asking us what shop sold those suits.
A strange phenomenon was the selling of ice cream in the winter; my favourite I believe was called a Leningradsky. Another slightly odd thing was the mausoleum containing the bodies of Lenin and Stalin, open coffins on full view. There were massive queues of people wanting to pay homage. Whatever their official titles were, to westerners they were known as the “Gruesome Twosome”.
Mixed with the abject poverty of the Russian populace, was the wonderful engineering. I was lucky to visit a huge space exhibition, absolutely amazing equipment. The people there were willing to answer any question I asked. My interest in engineering had started.
In our apartment, there was a rubbish shoot in the kitchen; this was the only way of getting rid of rubbish, presumably it all ended up in a bin in the basement. I could not fathom out why my mother was obsessed by cockroaches, she would gleefully pour large quantities of chemicals down the shoot. Quite a few years later, I finally twigged; obviously all the rubbish would be screened for anything of interest. The poor saps doing the job must have been struggling with everything drenched in chemicals. The picture is of the SISS; actually she was very nice and had a well-balanced view of the world. I only use the SISS acronym so her name is not published on the web.
Of great consternation to the Soviets was that the British embassy was in direct line of sight on the Kremlin. The embassy had been established long before radio, aircraft, or modern photography. Now the embassy was a prime site for intelligence gathering, (Not that the British would do or condone such a thing, I hasten to add). It probably was one of the most dangerous places in a crisis involving the Soviets. The pictures are the Kremlin with the embassy gate guard, in the foreground and the Kremlin, taken from the roof of the embassy.
I read that when the U-2 was shot down, a Russian chase fighter was hit by the same salvo and the pilot was killed. As the Russian people had suffered so badly in WW2, the State was duty bound to make sure nothing like that could happen again. With the admission that the U-2 had been shot down over Soviet territory, any lack of confidence in the State by the Soviet people could have lead to civil unrest. The tanks were a back-up should this have occurred, the best place to store them so as not to provoke civil unrest, was in sound of the diplomatic community. There was no civil unrest worthy of note, and the tanks were moved out relatively quickly.
I also read somewhere that Congress stopped the USA over flying Soviet air space with the U-2, the same source indicated that the RAF had then undertaken a mission for a US agency to get round the ban. The possibility was broached that the pilot was American and just attached to the RAF for the convenience of the mission, and that the plane was only on loan to the RAF for the duration of the mission, and the takeoff had been from a shared RAF / US base. The tack taken was that it was a US mission in all but name. It was an American source. As with anything to do with intelligence, government departments or agencies the full-unadulterated truth is never known for certain.
Norman, the answer to the question; “are you really allowed to write about this” Is; whoops too late! Actually, I have left out some of the gap filling information that my father told me in the later stages of his life while he was on morphine, Nothing earth shattering. It is a very accurate account of Moscow at the time, if some bureaucrat thinks it is inappropriate for me to write about it after all this time, it was inappropriate for me to be exposed to it when I was five.
Best regards
Doug Neaves